Five Good Covers presents five cross-genre reinterpretations of an oft-covered song.
Fact: “Sultans of Swing” is a musical manifesto par excellence. Dire Straits might have a reputation (unearned) for not taking risks, but in terms of a debut single, their willingness to go against fashion and to consider biting the hand of pop norms was a significant statement.
Dire Straits were one of the biggest acts of the ’80s. There is sometimes a sense that a talent as obvious as Mark Knopfler’s would inevitably find a way to be a success. Musical stardom is not like that. Sometimes the gap between a Mark Knopfler and a Vini Reilly is a small one, and the distance between either of them and someone who performs occasionally to a coterie of rapt fans even smaller. We all know of amazing guitarists who are not playing arenas for years on end and are giving lessons to budding future axe-wielders rather than wielding themselves.
There is also the issue of whether Dire Straits would have been the vehicle for that success, had it come at a different time or in a different way. With natural self-awareness augmented by decades of therapy, bassist John Illsley notes that the band members shaped Mark Knopfler’s vision, but it was nevertheless the band leader’s vision, and his songs. The outcome was massive success, and perhaps it would have been anyway. Or perhaps not. Perhaps the polishing and shaping from the different members of the group over the years fully enabled the outcome.
The band came together fortuitously. Mark’s younger brother David moved into a rundown apartment in a proleterian part of London, later followed by Mark, and eventually a four-piece band together came together. Of these, initially, only drummer Pick Withers was making a living from music, as a successful session musician and in-house drummer at Rockfield Studios, recent subject of a fascinating book by Tiffany Murray. The band could see that they had something special, but what band does not? They were willing to work hard, realizing that they might not get many more throws of the dice. What they did not have was a lot of road to take off or any means to turn their aptitude and endeavor into a record deal. Although they could live cheaply, by forsaking any sense of luxury or, indeed, hygiene, they could not do so forever.
As Illsley tells it a legacy from a grandmother, passed on to him by his parents, hoping it would cover rent for a period, was spent on a demo tape instead. The anchor of that tape was “Sultans of Swing,” and it was persistent radio play by a sympathetic believer in the band that eventually got the attention of the record companies, from which the band could choose a partnership. They chose that partnership on the basis of musical fit, rather than succumbing to the ministrations of Virgin, who assumed that indulgent female company might be the way to seal the deal!
As a choice to roll the dice on for the last time, it is a ballsy choice. Musical London in 1977 appealed to the emotions, and often the sartorial sense. Punk was taking it three chords and spittle-flecked frontmen to the irritated front pages of the newspapers and thus to the hearts of the young, disco was in the nightclubs appealing to lovers of all types, and rock was getting rockier and developing a subculture. Dire Straits was practicing, and proselytizing, none of these things. There was no fashion, fans did not form close-knit groups, and the music was not really danceable, nor did it have the rhythms for love.
The song specifically celebrate a form of music that, if it was ever fashionable in the UK at all, it was during a short-lived fad for ‘Trad Jazz’ in the ’60s, and which young people would largely not be aware of. The Sultans of Swing were a Dixieland Jazz band playing in a particularly hardscrabble bit of London, to an audience largely indifferent to their presence. Mark Knopfler found them fascinating. They made no concessions to fashion at all, and were happy with their choices. Partly because some of them had other (less enjoyable?) jobs to fall back on. Or because some of them, for instance the rhythm guitarist, seemed not to want too much success or adulation. They were happy with their lot, because they were playing the music they loved with people that they liked. They were not going to make any concessions for the sake of success. As manifesto and metaphor it was clear. Illsley and Withers provide expert, practiced and nuanced, rhythms to work with, David Knopfler does not make his guitar “cry or sing” but he provides a necessary backdrop. The choice to have Mark Knopfler’s legendary solo go on into the fade sent another message: I Can Do This All Day.
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